Beginner GameDev Mistakes - Ep 2

As always, game development and design has no real "rules". There are exceptions to everything. But this series seeks to provide a broad, general and hopefully helpful lens for new developers. Including a series of "mistakes", bad habits and pitfalls I see countless developers run into with their games that they might not be thinking about. In this video we look at some of the pitfalls faced when trying to teach, or work out HOW to teach, players to play your game! Tutorials & tutorialisation, how-to-play screens, play testing, etc.
▶ Edited by Vossel: / vossel
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I mostly make devlog videos about my projects and tutorial videos for GameMaker. If that interests you it would make me super happy if you would subscribe and stick around.

[@michaelafton2307]

Thanks for making me aware of those mistakes. Now I will do all of those because someone told me they make me stronger

[@jfturle]

"Having to fall down a hole at the beginning" is literally something Elden Ring had to fix after the beta and why the soldier of Godrick got to wait for me to never arrive. They put a ghost thing that basically says "Jump down, idiot" because it was just a dark pit and we've been trained over the years to be weary about being tricked into falling to our deaths.

[@tonguesurgery7188]

Great video! This kind of thing can never be understated. I'm making a 2D shoot-em-up game and once had someone playtest it. They did a full-on pacifist run. They never once tried shooting at an enemy. You will never, NEVER fully predict how someone will play and perceive your game. It is impossible for everything to be 100% obvious to everyone who plays your game!

[@Broelbrak]

Great vid! It also helps to find new fresh testers at each testing phase, because early testers get too good at guessing what you probably meant with something because of past experiences

[@SuperGamersgames]

Even if your "tutorial" is bad, as long as the player doesn't need to re-reference the controls constantly then you have done at least 60% of what is needed to teach the game. The other 40% entirely relates to putting that knowledge into practice and finally instinct. I hate to be the guy to say it (however it really is true), but Valve does a very good job of showing mechanics at work to easily explain how to play their games. To tie it back to the video, the only reason why they were capable of figuring this out is because they do extensive amounts of playtesting that reveal these issues. Playtesting is always your friend for a lot of things, but it is particularly helpful in revealing what knowledge a player lacks in portions of your game. :)

[@Yipper64]

0:38 what gets me is when they have what i'd say is good tutorialization and then *put text boxes on top of it* making it bad. Like, pikmin 4 has an excellent tutorial... if it wasnt for the massive amount of text boxes that just repeat what the level design and UI are already telling you. 4:45 I love arrows.

[@achehex]

A lot of times those extra boxes are added because playtesting showed people getting stuck at something, and it's better to make things overly clear than to have a portion of your playerbase unable to get past the first screen. Specially Nintendo games that aim to be as accessible to all experience levels as possible.

[@solindiegames1999]

Great video. You're so right about "you never get to play your game as a new player". It's such a hard balance of hand-holding vs total abandonment!

[@NoahNCopeland]

great video, you are a smart sillypants, please keep making these!

[@SorceressGamelab]

Thanks for making this series. It's definitely eye opening! I hope you will make more:) I definitely learned that you have to design your game assuming that a person has never played what you are making. Even if we think they probably know what is a platformer or an rpg always assume people don't know what to do and just do your best in gradually getting the gameplay feeling.

[@OxygenBeats]

keep these coming! loving it!

[@MastaXY]

Great video, love the format!

[@snailofkale]

one of my favorite tutorials in any game ever is the ones in mario and luigi paper jam (i havent played a lot of m&l games so im sure others have identical tutorial styles) you can just practice the attacks in a separate menu at any time. i think if it wasn't there i would never end up using any special attacks aside from trio racket, fire flower, and that shell kicking one, because if i didn't have a way to practice harder attacks like bomb derby, drill shell (idk why im so bad at drill shell lol) and ESPECIALLY the rocket one, i would never use those attacks ever because i would use them once in battle, do poorly because i would have no idea what im doing, and then never use it again because i did bad the first time. so ig what im getting at is that if you can allow an optional practice space like that, with low or no stakes, and it wouldn't mess up anything else, itd be really cool lol

[@carlosmiras5592]

Hey man, great vid. good to see you posting again.

[@RizaBochiza]

I don’t know why, but the ending to this video was so unexpected and hilarious to me. I love you for that.

[@Wallace-Jump-Man]

Very Interesting series. I like it a lot. By the way your game look so clean!

[@nuclearbeeberman]

love this new video series :)

[@theJMZero]

A very important topic succinctly discussed, great video!

[@BrendonReimer]

Thank you so much for your help Shaun

[@weirdbitgames]

This is great! I remember thinking I nailed it with my last game jam game.. and guess what, I had pages upon pages of an on-screen tutorial book, essentially.,

[@spindash64]

I remember trying to make a tutorial level in Mario maker when I was younger, trying to constrict the level enough that the player could ONLY make a correct move. …someone still found a way to chase the koopa shell down a pit

[@gameplayxtreme3389]

Something to add - every time you have to explain something to someone who is testing your game, write it down. For example, if you have to say "you're supposed to jump down this hole" during the test, write it down. Then when you're working on the game, make sure to add what you wrote down into the game in some way. In this example, maybe change how the hole looks so players know it's safe, or place an arrow pointing into it. Tl;dr: every explanation you give while watching someone playtest should (preferably non-verbally) be incorporated into the game itself.

[@lksxxtodin5292]

I loved the video ! You're a inspiration for me❤ I would love to see how did you make these insane visual effects 😅

[@mikelezhnin8601]

I guess there is also a second part to this about "sorting the game content by how hard it is" - put easy stuff at the start, put hard stuff at the end / as side quests.

[@OandCoGames]

I've found that setting up a booth at my local farmer's market works great for recruiting playtest participants. Total strangers who've never seen my game before.

[@steelphoenix8978]

i just want to say, this spear game looks so cool.

[@birdlegscass]

i still believe being able to develop a strong sense of what will and won't be intuitive or discoverable is important so you can maximize the effectiveness of playtesters and time, especially when they're limited. the more you can catch before a playtester comes in, the more time they'll have to catch what you weren't able to

[@ShaunJS]

Oh of course, you certainly want to train that muscle as much as you can. Just never rely on it or assume you nailed it.

[@pikmints]

Out of all the flaws a game can have, bad tutorials would probably be the thing that has pulled me away from games more than any other flaw. Some games give you an encyclopedia to read, some bombard you with tutorial boxes after every move you make, some will teach you a handful of mechanics only to gate your progression behind a mechanic that they haven't explained, and some will try to put so much emphasis on world building that they'll say "that's my house over there, come by if you need help" when there are 5 houses on screen only for the character not to be found when you check all 5.

[@giuseppearmandodias6462]

Hi, shaun. I watching you building the pokeypoke with metroidvania style. Then, I wanna ask you how create the rooms like you show in the video about fake walls using tiles

[@connortate5684]

man, this new series is pretty dang good, don't you think Daren?

[@qergergergergrtw3711]

nice video!

[@CGshurita]

Bravo!

[@fierorecensione5828]

king is back!

[@triplezgames3882]

Hey man, your wall tiles look awesome. I'm trying to have a similar art style but I have no Idea how you created them. Help would be so much appreciated... First, of course you used a tileset with dedicated edge/corner tiles. But at each edge, the texture seemingly procedurally extends towards the inside of the wall. I doubt that those are tiles as well, as there would be far too many variations... Is it a shader? Is it baked? For my mobile game, a shader scanning the screen, blurring edge and so on would be far too computationally expensive. Please let me know, thanks a lot in advance!

[@TakRathen]

That's definitely being done with just a second set of tiles that goes inside the outermost 'ring' around each island. This inner ring is the gradient.

[@triplezgames3882]

@@TakRathen Thanks for your response. I have a tileset that also allows for diagonal tiles... So that tileset would be huge :( Probably unfeasable in my case... I'm surprised, that there's literally no info about tilesets including diagonal tiles

[@NoahNCopeland]

the megaman GG reference at 4:08 , ah yes, baby's first "game design" video. XD

[@71507]

Sequelitis and its consequences have been a disaster for video game discourse.

[@ShaunJS]

I think they're great! The problem is just a classic one of when someone first learns a little bit about something they have a tendency to think they know more than they do.

[@nicreven]

god your game looks so dope

[@Jonttum91]

Could you do a tutorial on how to make Steam Achievements work or give any tips? It used to be easy, but after the Steamworks extension I haven't got it to work and lost interest. I would not care about it, but seems like so many people are achievements horders.

[@vossel]

HECK YEAAAAAHH!!!

[@idonthinkso807]

Who else let's a friend play test and they just don't play the game right and it's so weirdly frustrating

[@firedingo5]

I would say, ask what assumptions am I making? Then ask what is counter-intuitive in my game? like the holes = death in platformers

[@retrofictiongames]

It's funny if you think about how many players 'celebrate' hidden areas in Dark Souls games where you purposefully have to make leaps of faith, fall down elevator shafts etc., and yet they complain when they have to fall down a hole when there is literally *nowhere* else to go. I guess you just can't please everyone.

[@Uhfgood]

I suppose there's a lot of mistakes in making tutorials, but "back in my day" we didn't have tutorials. You did have a printed manual and that was it. You had to discover the rest for yourself. Kids have it way too good these days. However if you're going to do a tutorial probably find a way to integrated it into the gameplay so it doesn't FEEL like a tutorial.

[@fishyfish1917]

Silly pants! jk

[@firearrowz]

OMG, I’M FOURTH

[@kevin-bf4ww]

that twitter discourse disclaimer at the start 🥲